These days Google seems very active in retiring its products. Now, it's the turn of Currents, the service that supplanted Google + , which ended in April of 2020 as a social network for consumers. Currents was meant to serve companies who wanted an internal tool to communicate with employees in a similar way to a post / stream. Citing low usage, Google now plans to also close Currents and replace it with Spaces in the new integrated Gmail / Chat.
Spaces started out as “Rooms”, but received a major overhaul (and name change) when Workspace became available “for everyone”. It was designed to be a “dedicated place to organize people, topics and projects ” that integrates tightly with Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Meet . Given the similarity, Google is “planning to shrink” Currents next year, with a migration path that will see “remaining content and communities” moved to Spaces .
The transfer of Google Currents to Spaces will require the latter to acquire some new community-oriented features , including support for larger groups, communication leadership, advanced search with discoverability and content moderation tools. Other features include “ platform functionality for app development and security and enterprise-grade compliance , including data protection, data loss prevention (DLP) and Vault support “.
Google will provide a calendar for existing users (and administrators) of Currents to migrate over the next few months. In the short term, the following features will no longer be available :
- Analytics mail
- Popular tags page
- Active tags embedded in stream All i Posts
- Community Insights
- Profile Influence
- Mobile notifications
- Follower count
